Activism for working folk.

2017.12.21

Action: data security, and science at the EPA.

PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1816, the Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act. You know the story by now: Equifax, one of the world's largest credit reporting corporations, exposed the personal information of 145 million Americans -- said information including names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers, and even drivers' license numbers, and then offered credit freezes to those good folks for a fee. Does that sound like civilized behavior? Causing people harm, and then charging them to fix it? S. 1816 would mandate that credit reporting corporations would have to offer consumers free credit freezes, and couldn't charge them for lifting the freeze temporarily or permanently, either. S. 1816 would also force those corporations to refund any fees it collected for its credit freezes after September 7, and would also spruce up the fraud protections of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Hopefully good folks aren't still asking how is this the government's job? Equifax's bad behavior proves why our government needs to step in.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell America's Comptroller General and the Government Accountability Office to investigate the EPA's recent ban of certain scientists from the agency's scientific advisory boards, then CREDO still helps you do that. Look at the cojones on EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt, claiming that scientists who've taken grants from the EPA shouldn't be on its advisory boards -- but fossil fuel hacks should be! No conflict of interest there, right? Of course, a simple solution presents itself -- that scientists should recuse themselves from advising the EPA on matters concerning their own government-funded research -- but you can't turn the EPA into a flunky of big polluters that way. Doesn't matter that some of Mr. Pruitt's new "advisors" are scientists themselves -- if those scientists get to advise the EPA on matters concerning their former (and possibly future!) paymasters, then the EPA is using a double standard. We expect that from the Trump Administration, I guess, but we shouldn't put up with it.

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